Yearning for the Possible
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Harry has never accepted that anything is impossible, and that includes persuading Draco to come out. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Yearning for the Possible

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Angst, established relationship, mentions of homophobia

**Rating: **PG-13

**Wordcount: **3200

**Summary: **Harry has never accepted that anything is impossible, and that includes persuading Draco to come out.

**Author's Notes: **This is an Advent fic for phonixfeder, who asked for a story where Draco does not want be gay and Harry persuades him to eventually acknowledge that he is. Happy Advent!

**Yearning for the Possible**

Harry was looking around the dismal, pale room where he and Draco usually lay down together, on the pale bed that seemed dirty to him even while it glowed with the whiteness of sheets freshly-changed by house-elves, when he heard the door open and shut downstairs.

Harry closed his eyes and spent a moment closing his hands on air, because there was nothing in the room that he wanted to touch.

_Here we are._

"Harry?"

Draco always did that if Harry didn't appear right away when he walked into the house. He would call for Harry, but his voice was muffled, muted, as if he worried the ancestral portraits he had banished from this Malfoy property when he asked for it from Lucius would return after all and find out the dirty secret.

That their descendent and heir slept with a man, and neither he nor the man in question had any intention of changing it.

_But some things have to change. _Harry straightened his spine and walked down the steps.

Draco had stopped calling by the time Harry reached the bottom of the staircase, and was unwinding his white scarf from around his neck, his head bowed as though he wanted Harry to see each parting of the scarf's fringe from the bright hair on the back of his neck. Harry paused on the long, polished marble staircase, struck as always by Draco's beauty. It was a deeper, richer thing than a glance at him from the distance would tell you, where he still looked a little like the pointed and washed-out boy from school. But closer to, you could see the life that lit his eyes, the quiet confidence that guided his steps, and the soaring way that his hands moved.

Draco looked up now, and the life flickered into his eyes at the sight of Harry. "There you are," he said, so quietly Harry would have missed the words if he didn't have a fairly good idea of what they might be. "Come here and give me a kiss."

Harry knew what would happen if he did _that_. Draco was at his most persuasive with his hands and his body. He was the one who had noticed Harry looking and challenged him with an eyebrow six years ago. Harry had come over to see if that eyebrow meant what it said, and they'd fallen into bed with an eagerness that made Draco seem as if he was striving to win something when he fucked Harry.

Harry knew now what his struggle had been against. And he wanted that struggle ended tonight.

"Draco," he said, and stopped a short distance from him. Draco gave him an incredulous glance, as though trying to decide why Harry hadn't simply fallen at his feet. "We need to talk."

"Not _again_," said Draco, rolling his eyes. "Yes, I would meet you over at your house if it was safe, Harry, but you know that reporter almost got a photograph of me last month. Even going over there on a visit is too risky." He and Harry had a fiction that they were friends, so they could occasionally spend time together without revealing their real relationship.

"And that's the problem," Harry said.

Draco stiffened like one of those beautiful marble statues of his ancestors that Harry had seen in Malfoy Manor on his one, disastrous visit, the one where he'd thought Draco was almost ready to explain to his parents that he was in love with Harry. "What?" he whispered.

It had taken Harry a long time to be ready to challenge that tone of voice. He didn't want to lose Draco, and it was so much _easier, _as well as happier for them both, to come over and yield and kiss Draco and let both of them be lost in their lovemaking in that pale bed upstairs.

But finally, Harry's disgust had become stronger than his delight. He took a step nearer. "I want to tell people the truth," he said. "That you're in love with me. That you're with me. I don't want to have to hold my tongue and smile when I see you explaining to the latest gossip reporter that you have a secret girlfriend you just don't want to _introduce _to the public yet, not until you're sure the animosity from the war has died down and she'd be safe."

"You know that's only an acceptable fiction for my parents and the rest of society," Draco began. "You know that-"

"You're living a lie, and you prize that lie more than anything else," Harry said. "Well. You can do that for as long as you want, but you're not going to make _me _live a lie any longer. This is it. The end. We tell the truth, or I go."

Draco watched him in a stillness that Harry had good reason to know was more dangerous than motion. Then he made a little gesture with his hand. He was always doing that, testing, and this time, Harry was ready for it and didn't flinch. He held Draco's gaze and took another step towards him, so they were almost literally nose to nose.

"It's different for you," Draco said at last, and Harry knew the arguments that were coming. He could have recited them _with _Draco, but he knew that would only cause an instant rift between them, and Harry didn't want that. He wasn't going to suppress those arguments, he was going to lure them into the open and destroy them.

"People are so grateful to you that they don't care you're gay. You can be whatever you want. And you announced it when people were asking why you didn't start dating Ginny Weasley again, so they accepted it as an excuse, too. Besides, you're not pure-blood. You don't have parents expecting grandchildren. You don't have a heritage and tradition that you have to live up to." Draco flicked his fingers as if tossing dust away. "You don't have to maintain that concern with living in harmony with the ways of nature that pure-bloods do, lest we lose our connection with our ancestral estates."

Harry could have let him go on, but those were the basic arguments. Besides, Draco had started using "lest." If Harry didn't stop him, he was going to go on and on until it was practically "forsooth."

"Have you ever seen many differences between pure-bloods and other people in their concern for nature?" Harry demanded promptly, crossly. "I mean, I remember people who were pure-bloods had things made of wood and stone and lived indoors and used water and mistreated house-elves and other magical creatures just like lots of other people did."

Draco looked at him with slightly parted lips. Then he shook his head. "It's more a spiritual purity than an actual purity," he said.

"Then it can't have anything to do with you who have sex with," said Harry, and made his voice deliberately maddening.

"I mean-animals mate and have children, and we're close to nature. We have to do the same thing."

Harry laughed. These arguments had never got this ridiculous before. On the other hand, he had often given up the minute Draco tried to argue like this, because he would be so disgusted and upset. "I can show you all kinds of Muggle books written by people who studied animals and found out that males mate with males sometimes and females mate with females. If you need justification for what we do in the natural world, there you have it."

Draco raised one hand as though he was trying to ward Harry away from a sensitive spot. "Fine," he said. "It's a concept of purity that you'll never understand."

"It doesn't sound as though _you_ understand it much, either."

Draco shook his head, a faint, sensitive smile working its way over his lips. "I was trying to spare your feelings, because I know you care about things like this. It's a purity that's useless to argue in front of you, though."

Harry immediately shifted tactics. "Well, if that's the case, then we should end this for your own sake. You can go off and be pure with all the women you want, and I'll go find someone else and be impure with them-"

Draco took a step forwards and seized his shirt. "If you're ever with someone else," he whispered, and raised his wand.

Harry stared back at him. "You're absurdly jealous for someone who plans to get married and have pure grandchildren for your pure parents."

Draco dropped his shirt, but he kept glaring into Harry's face. "Have you been with anyone else?" he whispered, and shifted his wand restlessly from one hand to another again. "Remember that I'll know if you lie."

Harry smiled without humor. Draco claimed he had a natural ability, after the war, to detect lies and figure out when someone was trying to trick him. Harry was amazed that he managed that well, when he was engaged in lying to himself so earnestly each and every day.

"I haven't," Harry said, and only waited for Draco to relax before he struck. "And you know perfectly well that it wasn't as safe as all _that _for me to tell people I was gay. I started getting more love potions slipped into my food than ever. There was that period of about six months when I couldn't eat outside the house, remember? I couldn't be sure that the people I was talking to hadn't either tried to make me fall in love with them or been bribed to do it for someone else."

Draco grimaced and began prowling back and forth in front of him. "But that's behind you now. I would face...I can't even imagine what I would face."

Harry laughed, and didn't care about the way that it sounded, as if he was a clock with a gear creaking, or the way Draco turned and stared at him. "So let me get this straight. It's fine for me because it's the past. But as long as it's in your future, you can't bear to face it?"

"You have no idea what pressures are on me. My parents-"

"I know perfectly well," Harry interrupted him. "You've explained it to me often enough. And that's one reason I held off on this for so long. I know you don't want to disappoint your parents, and you want to give them grandchildren."

He also knew that Draco hadn't made the least motion towards actually contracting a marriage the way his parents wanted, despite his tales of girlfriends and the way he would dance with women at parties. Draco could have been bisexual, or willing to have a wife and Harry as a lover on the side, but he hadn't shown the least sign of liking either idea. Harry had once tried to bring up the idea of sharing Draco with a wife, and Draco had roared at him and then kept close tabs on him for the next month, sure that Harry's ideas indicated some tendency towards unfaithfulness on his part.

Draco talked about being conservative and unable to handle the idea of disappointing his parents or an object of gossip. He talked about getting married someday. He talked about how he and Harry would drift apart the way that his friends drifted apart from the objects of their inappropriate flings that they'd undertaken only to spite their parents.

He said all that, and then he was not only stubbornly loyal to Harry (in private) but demanded the same of Harry. It would have been romantic if it wasn't so stupid.

"I don't want to disappoint them," said Draco, and his head tilted back so far that his nose pointed at the ceiling. "They do want grandchildren."

"Do you want _children_?"

Draco gave him a baffled look. Harry waited. This was a point they had never come to, and now that he thought about it, he didn't see why not. Of _course _it was going to be obvious at some point that Harry would ask the question. He reckoned that he hadn't so far because, in the first few years, their secrecy had seemed thrilling instead of burdensome, and then he hadn't wanted to cause Draco pain.

Now, his own pain was too great.

"Of course," Draco said, but experimentally, as if he was waiting to see what Harry would say in return.

"Then you'll have to get married eventually," Harry said. "If you want them, and the idea of adoption isn't feasible to you."

Draco's face worked strangely. Harry waited. "It wouldn't be feasible to my parents," Draco said at last.

"And having an illegitimate grandchild wouldn't be, either," Harry said, just to explore the route that might give Draco a child but eliminate a wedding. He didn't think Draco wanted to take that route, but Harry was going to cut off every path but two in this conversation.

"Of _course _not!"

"Then it wouldn't be to you, either." Harry was the one to move closer to him again, his forehead a short distance away from Draco's. "Don't you think this is all pointing to something?"

Draco's face closed. "What?"

"You don't want to do things that will displease your parents," Harry said. "But you don't want to do the things that will please them, either. Like giving me up-"

"They don't know about you. They can't demand that when they don't know about you."

Harry paused. _Here, _he thought. _Here's the heart of it. _"And that's the real reason you won't tell them about me. Because as long as you don't have the conversations, then you don't have to worry about me telling you off and finding someone I can be open with, and you _also _don't have to worry about them telling you off and maybe disowning you."

Draco stared at him with a silently working jaw. Then he snarled, "You've been perfectly pleased to do this for the last six years-"

"Only for the first three," Harry said, and swept his hand around the house. "I hate this place, how the only furnished room is the one where we fuck, and then we have to leave at certain times, and I always have to be under a Disillusionment Charm. I hate that I have to put up with your pretend flirtations, and my friends are getting suspicious of the way I always fob them off when they ask about my love life, but you won't let me tell them _anything_, even that I have a boyfriend the way you tell your parents that you have a girlfriend. I hate everything about being secret."

"Do you want another boyfriend, then?" Draco arched his neck, making him look like a proud horse.

"I want someone I can love openly," Harry said. "I would prefer that was you. If it won't be, as of tonight, then yes, I'm going to find someone who _will_."

"You know my reasons."

"They've been good enough for six years," Harry said, and he spoke the way he thought Draco did, without apology. "Now, they're not. I think that you're afraid, and I understand why. But I can't live my life under your fear."

Draco shut his eyes. Harry felt a small twist in his heart. He thought he knew what that meant. Draco was going to refuse to face his own fear. He would turn away and shake his head, and he would reiterate his arguments, and he wouldn't make a move to stop Harry from walking out of the house.

In the end, fear mattered more to him than love.

"All right," Harry said, in a hoarse, bitter voice, and turned away to face the door. He still wore his cloak. He wouldn't even need to go upstairs to fetch it, the way he'd had to other times he'd stayed here and left on Draco's carefully planned schedule that would let them avoid drawing suspicion.

As he opened the door, Draco's hand clamped onto his arm.

Harry tugged back angrily. "I'm not going to let your fear dictate my _life_," he snapped, and then Draco surged towards him and kissed him.

Harry bore the kiss for one second before he pushed Draco away. Draco shook his head in response, his face flushed, his lips pink.

"Yes, all right," Draco whispered. "I was afraid. I _am _afraid. But if the choice is telling everyone or losing you, then-I choose to tell everyone."

Harry stared at him cautiously, feeling a flutter of deep hope, and telling himself that it couldn't be true. Draco had recited and rehearsed those arguments for six years. Harry had _hoped _that he would be able to persuade Draco out of them, but the hope had been stupid, he was sure of it.

But Draco cupped his face and whispered, "What you said was true. I knew I would have to decide someday. But as long as I could put off that decision, that was okay. And I could have both things I wanted."

Harry laughed, a sound that soared despite its grimness. "Sometimes you're a bastard, you know that?"

"But that's part of the reason you fell in love with me," Draco countered, ducking his head so that he was watching Harry from beneath his fringe.

"It is," said Harry. "And I'm still in love, and now maybe I can _stay _that way." He caught Draco's hands and held them, closing his fingers down in a way that would let him feel each individual one of Draco's fingers in response. Draco closed his eyes and ducked his head, shuddering a little.

Harry took Draco into his arms. Draco had been strong for once, and now Harry could be. "It'll be all right," he whispered.

Draco nodded, but didn't look up from Harry's chest.

"I promise," Harry added, and his embrace became cradling. Right now, he knew, it wouldn't matter if he opened the door and they both stood there in plain sight of anyone who might have followed Draco to the house. They could do that now. If they wanted.

And Harry wanted, with the same devouring desire that he had experienced for six years without ever believing he would have the chance to exercise it. There had been another desire devouring him at the time, and it had seemed more important.

Now he would have the chance to feel them both.

And everything _would _be all right. He would make it so. He would be there when Draco told his parents, when he told the world, when he wrestled with his own strange, unstable convictions about having a wife and family being somehow purer and more natural.

This would work.

**The End.**


End file.
